The End of 2012

Here are the two realities, best and worst, that are most on my mind now, at the end of this very big year.

Nicolas Kivilinna, Bringer of Happiness:

And then there is this truth, below, and all that it implies. I have learned over the course of my seventy-one years, particularly during the last two years, that there are certain definite things about which I am right but about which only a very few people will agree. For example, I believe it is clear sign of insanity to own a yacht as long as there is one child in my community (which in my case is this world) who needs medical/dental care and food and shelter. Very few, as I say, will agree with me on this and yet I am absolutely certain that I am right. And here is one more undeniable truth:

Gator Stare

This is a true story, not a lie. I'm at this loading dock in Miami one night a few years ago and am standing beside my truck at the dock while the guys are doing the loading. There's a slight slope beside me for about ten feet down into a drainage waterway which is about twenty feet across, full of dark, dirty, greenish water. This strange feeling of danger comes over me, a feeling that something is wrong here, just totally absorbing my attention. I look down into the edge of the water and there is this alligator, about twelve feet away, just staring very steadily at me. All I can see at first are the eyes and the end of the nose, and then I can just make out the head and its front legs which look a little like fins slanting down into the water. I stare back at it, neither of us flinching or blinking or moving for what seems like about five to ten minutes, when finally it very slowly swims off to the right.

That story brings me to Thomas Frank's book, What's The Matter with Kansas?, of which I've thought often since it first came out in 2004.

The question of the book was, Why are low-wage, unemployed, underemployed, exploited, uninsured, ill-housed, ill-fed, ill-clothed poor people out there demonstrating for, and voting for, politicians who demand even greater income disparity - lower wages and benefits for the poor, and more breaks favoring wealthy people?

These poorly-paid people take great offense when you tell them that they are voting against their own interests, and that rich people are not only better off than any time in history but that most are not even asking for these breaks.

I've heard many explanations of what the matter is with Kansas, and my best guess is that more than one of them are true – that it is "over-determined," in psychoanalytic language, rather than having just one reason. Some of the explanations I have heard are: low information, too much exclusive exposure to right-wing radio and Fox News, strong self-reliance and other personal virtues including love of freedom, hatred of the “librul” enemy, “Stockholm Syndrome,” distrust of government but trust of local politicians who are nonetheless 'owned,' fundamentalist/radical Protestantism, provincialism or lack of understanding of the complexity of the larger world which they are necessarily but not obviously a part. I do not doubt that there are further explanations being offered.

I have had a part-time big-truck driving job during the past year for which I get paid about $12 an hour with no benefits, which is the same dollar-amount pay I got when I first started driving in 1988, twenty-five years ago and with a health care benefit. The dollar-amount pay for this skilled, odd-hours, highly-dangerous work is the same as it was twenty-five years ago.

I calculate using the Consumer Price Index that in real value terms I now receive exactly one-half the real pay that I received twenty-five years ago, now with no benefits, an “at-will” clause, vastly more crowded highways, fewer parking places, more rules/inspections/tests, more contempt and more danger. This loss does not include the mortgage-banking and Libor swindles.

Recently, I have talked with some workers about this and what I get is silence. No visible, no detectable reaction. The sides of the face, the mouth, the cheeks, the eyes don't move, but I know something is going on in there. It's the “gator stare” and it has come often to me lately that this image is what I have been picking up increasingly since society went consciously, programmatically, selfish and predatory after the Viet-Nam war.

Strange but delightful to say, I'm also finding more and more people whose smiles, understanding, humor, and whose very existence, near or far away, are protective and redemptive. There seems to be some way in which hard times bring out something good; some way in which darkness makes the stars shine brighter.

Anthem

The thing that is most on my mind, most of the time as well as this Christmas morning in 2012, is the reality of young people's having to face the horror and to figure out what to make of it.

The best hope concerning it that I can draw from this last, passing, year may seem to come through very small cracks, but that's how the light gets in, as Leonard Cohen's Anthem puts it:

The crack from this last year that lets the most promise in for me has to be Eben Alexander's simple but profound portrayal of our independence of the brain/body, that we are spiritual beings having an earthly experience rather than earthly beings having a spiritual experience.

My own earthly experience continues, longer than I expected, and I see the depth and extent of the horror more than ever. The latest glimpse was from reading a new book on deception, trivialization and manipulation on the Internet by Ryan Holiday, Trust Me I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator. He quotes a major Gawker blogger's complaint:

Fake news. I don't mean fake news in the Fox News sense. I mean the fake news that clogs up most newspapers and most news websites, for that matter. The new initiative will go nowhere. The new policy isn't new at all.... The product isn't revolutionary. And journalists pretend that these official statements and company press releases actually constitute news....Fake news, manufactured, hyped, rehashed, retracted – until at the end of the week you know no more than at the beginning.

The repentant Ryan says of this: “It is like Kim Kardashian complaining how fake reality TV shows are.”

The crack through which light comes in to me is sometimes something seemingly small like Alexander's book. Another that comes to my mind right now from a few years ago was waking up one cold, gray, lonely, rainy morning in my truck at some muddy, forsaken, filthy truck-stop in Texas. Rivulets of rain were running down the windshield, but – there was some early morning light refracting through the streams and droplets on the glass into countless, sharp, sparkling colors. I remember seeing such refractions through dewdrops like millions of diamonds in the grass around my home in New Hampshire after the loss of a loved one. I've seen even more colors than these in the eyes of a loved one.

That's how the light gets in for me despite my deepening awareness of the horror and darkness. And what comes to me as the large picture is that the horror is necessary in order that we see through it and come out the other side of it, so that we will then be able to appreciate what we necessarily could not have appreciated before, because we necessarily would not have been able to know the difference.

I think it's like the necessity of knowing an other language in order to understand and appreciate your own language, or like the necessity of taking the viewpoints of others in order to be able to know your self.

Frankenstein's Monster

"Mother Monster" Lady Gaga

Mary Shelley wrote the Frankenstein book when she was only eighteen years old, in 1816.

Ellen Moers wrote in 1974 a classic article on the book bringing out for the first time the fact that it is very much a birth issues book:
 

Much in Mary Shelley's life was remarkable. She was the daughter of a brilliant mother (Mary Wollstonecraft) and father (William Godwin). She was the mistress and then wife of the poet Shelley. She read widely in five languages, including Latin and Greek. She had easy access to the writings and conversation of some of the most original minds of her age. But nothing so sets her apart from the generality of writers of her own time, and before, and for long afterward, than her early and chaotic experience, at the very time she became an author, with motherhood. Pregnant at sixteen, and almost constantly pregnant throughout the following five years; yet not a secure mother, for she lost most of her babies soon after they were born; and not a lawful mother, for she was not married -- not at least when, at the age of eighteen, Mary Godwin began to write Frankenstein. So are monsters born.

I recently bought the Norton Critical Edition of the book because I had the idea that it was especially relevant to currents of thought in the nineteenth century in which I am interested: Enlightenment-Romantic issues, post-Revolution and post-Napoleon issues, “Great Man” ambition issues.

I, like most others up until Moers, had the idea that it was principally about the over-reach of enlightenment and science, a Sorcerer's Apprentice kind of book. Many people had noted several other themes in it, including Milton's Paradise Lost and the Prometheus legend. But no one had brought out the motherhood theme the way Moers did. It seems incredible to me that it took almost two hundred years of widespread exposure before anyone realized that motherhood/childbirth is right there at the center of it.
 

One of my neighbors is this morbidly obese woman who has two children under five whom she did not want. I hear her screaming at them sometimes in a blood-chilling, breath-stopping way. They seem like dear, cute little kids from a distance – I've never actually met them – but everyone who knows them says they are “monsters.” That is exactly the word they use, the word Mary Shelley uses for her Creature.

It's so obvious that it's just painful to realize that Frankenstein has been read, seen in plays and film with different versions and sequels, for two hundred years and been so under-appreciated. Perhaps creators/parents can't easily admit that they shouldn't have brought children into the world or they believe that it's somehow “unnatural” to be not wanting their children. Perhaps it's difficult for a child to grasp fully and validly that their creators/parents truly did not want them. I think women are more sensitive than men to the hurt involved in such situations, although Frankenstein's Monster, a male, is highly sensitive, intelligent, perceptive, articulate.

This thing about a child feeling abandoned by its Creator in some way is clearly a fundamental issue. It's the issue of “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Some people are able to work through it, but many are definitely like Frankenstein's Monster and become fiendishly murderous despite, perhaps even because of, their great sensitivity - desperately lonely, unhappy, destructive of self as well as others in this situation.

I was struck by Eben Alexander, in the last chapter of this Proof of Heaven which I recently discussed, writing about how the matter of his being adopted was so important to him. My first thought was that a man of his experience and education and wisdom would have got beyond that concern. But no. And I've noticed this, without understanding, in the cases of many other people whom I've known who were, or felt they were, abandoned in some form or other by their natural parents.

I feel embarrassed that it took me this long, seventy-one years, and a reading of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, for the “click.”

Lady Gaga with Kiss

Lady Gaga is very much about acceptance, and coming to terms with being born this way. She comes out and tells her “Little Monsters” that It's all right, you're OK now, I'm here. That's what Frankenstein's Monster longed to hear and asked to hear and needed to hear.

Gaga's Little Monsters in Indonesia

Language Is Social

"There is no such thing as society"

A language is an accomplishment of, and gift from, others who came before we were able to speak it. It is social by nature, consisting of symbols requiring mutuality, participation in and importation of the other.

A language has a history going back centuries. It develops through the contributions of many people in real-life practical situations that involve cooperation with others. This is as true of its rules as it is of its symbols. It exists before we are born and is given to us by others, by society, for free.

Language is our most valuable tool. Meaning itself is a function of language. Language capability is one good definition of humanity itself and it makes possible higher levels of complexity of organization and accomplishment than any individual could even imagine by himself.

“Republicans/Conservatives/Independent Rugged Individualists/Freedom-Loving Real Americans” like to think that they were never given anything for free by society, that everything they have is from their own individual initiative, that nothing is free, that they owe nothing to others, that they may grab what they can from others, especially the “weak,” for themselves and their own immediate kind - that "There is no such thing as society,” as Margaret Thatcher encapsulated the ethic.

There was a time not long ago when they labelled anyone who was aware of the fact that humans and human group life are social to the core as “a commie” but that symbol lost its communal value and their current substitute is “a socialist.”

Nicolas Kivilinna and The Fifth Floor Band

Nicolas' band has a new album just out entitled ”All My Life” that I like a whole lot. His recent solo album is also excellent.

You can find more on these at his website, Nicolas Kivilinna, by plugging the URL for the Finnish-language pages into Google Translate. The words on the tabs “Keikat” and “Lyriikat” are cognates of the English words “Gigs” and “Lyrics.” Google Translate literally translates his name Kivilinna as “Stone Castle” and makes other mistakes but you get the idea of what's being said.

Here, for convenience, is a video of them doing "All My Life" from the new album. Nicolas is on the right in the initial frame below:

Student Debt

The incident that I recall most often from the recent Presidential election campaigns in the United States was Willard Romney's suggestion that students who want to go to college might borrow the money from their parents.

Many people made comments on the remark as proving that Romney was out-of-touch with the lives of ordinary people, naïve, nasty, stupid, or just plain old goofy. But I am always very cautious about any explanation which involves the explainer asserting superiority – morally, intellectually or in any other way – to someone else.

People are far sharper than they are commonly given credit. They pick up on things, even better than the animals. The idea that people are stupid, particularly about highly consequential matters like choosing a President, is very misleading. The temptation to it goes: “How could any intelligent person vote for George W. Bush [or Barack Obama] twice?”

Julián Castro

But Romney was clearly a highly intelligent, “successful” person. I think he very well knew that his suggestion about borrowing money from your parents to go to school did not apply to students' reality. A response to Romney by Julián Castro was “Why didn't I think of that?” Castro knew. Romney knew. Everybody knew.

The reason student debt is such a big issue to me is that I think young people need time to explore the world, to read and to think and to experience the failures that are necessary to achieve wisdom. Once you have to make those monthly payments, you can't do that fundamental reflection: further obligations accrue on a highly complex course of life; justifications accumulate and harden; unanticipated expenses arise; alternatives are closed off; enemies do their thing; the depth and antiquity of our psyches become apparent; time passes quickly.

Bucky Fuller

Bucky Fuller held that society should provide tuition for every person as long as he or she wants to study. He said that “knowledge” is the real “wealth,” ultimately, which was part of his comprehensive philosophy of what it is that actually allows us to solve our problems. This seems to me to be the right direction, however distant it may be, if knowledge can be defined as implying or involving the “other.”

"Proof of Heaven" by Eben Alexander

Eben Alexander's new book, “Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife,” contains an account of his near-death experience during an attack of e. coli meningitis, and his reflections upon that experience.

It became an immediate best-seller; many words have been written about it; the author is with Oprah this weekend; and Raymond Moody says that “Dr. Eben Alexander's near-death experience is the most astounding I have heard in more than four decades of studying this phenomenon.”

The book is well-written and the bibliography at the end of the book is only six pages long but lists all the really good, current, most significant, books on the subject.

My main thought after reading it is about whether or not it will make any difference. I appreciate the old Russian proverb that says that one word of truth can change the world, but it seems to me that often when truth is told, it doesn't have the slightest effect on the world except to destroy the earthly life of the person who tells it. “You'll never work in this town [or profession] again.” “We know where your children go to school.”

I can barely begin to imagine what might happen if, for instance, all the intellectual power in the scientific establishment and the academy came to see that love is the most important scientific fact, as Alexander says it is:

Not much of a scientific insight? Well, I beg to differ. I'm back from that place, and nothing could convince me that this is not only the single most important emotional truth in the universe, but also the single most scientific truth as well.

So the book's great popularity does give me some pause. But my best sense of it is that it is a source of light and comfort and joy.

A later addendum: Oprah's interview with Eben Alexander is actually well worth watching. It's broken into segments but you can access all of them from this link.

Celine Dion's Ave Maria

Celine Dion's rendition of Schubert's Ave Maria strikes me more than any other version I've heard.

Two thoughts come to mind of why this touches me so deeply. One is the French-Canadian thing. My own grandfather was French-Canadian; the city where I was born and first worked was highly French-Canadian; I went to university for four years in Montreal; I've visited French-Canada many times over the years; and it has just been in my mind seemingly forever. I recognize it in Celine immediately. She sings this Ave Maria in English, but I recognize that immediately also, as part of the French-Canadian experience.

The other reason it strikes me so strongly, I think, is the way she sings the phrase “Oh Mother hear a suppliant child.” I share that vision, for those I love in their hour, especially for that one woman whose humanity it was given to me to know most deeply.

Joan Baez

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Joan Baez has done so many good things that it is difficult for me to pick out any of them to share with you without feeling parochial.

Her work in the effort to stop the US's war in Viet-Nam has to be one of the best and she was also very much at the center of the civil rights fight, one of "the civil rights crowd," as Clarence Thomas puts it. I often think of her and Martin Luther King Jr. together, constantly vilified and under the threat of death.

Here are two songs in which she particularly reaches me. They are both highly compassionate and visionary. “Be Not Too Hard” helps me against self-destroying anger and bitterness toward the guys and their supporters who did all that killing and napalming and the torching of poor peoples' hooches with their cigarette lighters, smiling for newsreel photographers as they did it, supported by an ideology of doing it for their own good, and elderly poor people begging them not to do it. Hatred is so subtle, so Fiendish. “The Green Green Grass of Home” is very visionary the way she does it and allows me to imagine and to hope beyond the horror.